Do you have a global mindset?Heeft u een ‘global mindset’?Har du ett globalt mindset?Vertreten Sie eine globale Einstellung?
I recently did a presentation on Talk About IT. One of the topics of my story was how mindset affects (working with) global teams. The highlights:
1. ‘I want to have people in my office’
This is a mindset that many people have and quite rational too. It’s easier to cooperate with people in the same office than with people outside. As John Blazey of TomTom put it during the event: ‘It is easy to work with someone on the same floor. But as soon as that colleague moves one floor down, things become different. It makes no difference whether they are one floor down or in another country’.
If it were possible to always find the best possible person for every position within a short period of time paying the right price, the mindset would be ok. But today, especially in Western Europe, it’s hard to find skilled people. The mindset that can help here is ‘I work with talent from any place on the planet’. This opens up the possibility of tapping into a global talent pool and attract the smartest and best people. It also opens the way to finding out the best way of managing people on a distance from another country.
2. ‘Offshoring destroys jobs’
Many people intuitively believe that if a company decides to hire somebody in India, it automatically means a job is lost in the home country. This mindset creates fear and closes a possibility of attracting the brightest people to your company. Research has already shown that offshoring actually leads to job creation in both the home country and the offshore destination.
The mindset that opens up possibilities is ‘the economic pie keeps on growing’. A quote from the book Linchpin of Seth Godin illustrates this:
‘If we enlarged the pie by bringing in the best programmers from around the world, it’s inevitable that tons of jobs would be created for local talent as well. It seems to me that your outlook is completely due to your worldview.’
3. ‘Us versus them’
People often tend to think in terms of ‘us’ (the people onshore) versus ‘them’ (those Ukrainians). It is much easier to blame somebody far away than the colleague sitting next to you. Having such mindset will not help in the improvement needed to create value.
I had a talk a few weeks back with Pepijn Smits. He told me ‘a few years ago, I prohibited myself from saying ‘those Romanians’, because this doesn’t help me. I need my colleagues from Romania to make my customers happy.’ This mindset leads to patience and understanding and ultimately will create the value that you desire.
I wonder what mindset you have? Can you share some mindsets that helped you or didn’t help you working with global colleagues?
About Hugo Messer
Hugo Messer is a Dutch entrepreneur, distributed agile team specialist, and author. He is the founder and owner of Bridge Global, a software services provider, and ekipa.co., an agile coaching agency. He has been building and managing teams around the world for the past several years. His passion is to enable people that are spread across cultures, geography and time zones to cooperate. Whether it’s offshoring or nearshoring, he knows what it takes to make global cooperation work.
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I totally agree with the point of that “It makes no difference whether they (your colleagues) are one floor down or in another country’. I’ve experienced it many times by myself.
Besides, based on my own experience coworking with people from different countries helps to gather best of the best in terms of specific experience. It just expands the boundaries of the patterns we are used to..